Metrics that count

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the March-April 2016 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

March-April 2016

When I visit my millennial-aged daughter in Chicago, I’m amazed at the number of packages dropped off by UPS, FedEx and the USPS at her three-unit building on a daily basis. It’s as if she and her neighbors are single-handedly keeping Amazon in business. All those drop-offs got me to wondering: Does any of this make sense if you think about a carbon footprint? Rather than deliver millions of packages to one address at a time every day, wouldn’t it be more sustainable if we all just drove to the mall to do our shopping? After all, doesn’t research indicate that a signi cant percentage of consumers, especially millennial consumers like my…

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Over the years, measuring manufacturing performance has been an ongoing challenge for companies. Plants have operated in isolation, disconnected from the supply chain, or have employed metrics that are diametrically opposed to the end goals of the business, such as choosing to focus on efficiency and uptime when flexibility is required.

Isolation and disconnection is no longer acceptable in today’s global economy. The growth in product portfolios and the expansion of supply networks to reach more markets puts a strong focus on the need to have reliable and integrated manufacturing processes and measure them as part of the end-to-end supply chain. The question is: What are the metrics and alignment best practices that are driving manufacturing excellence today?

In 2015, Gartner conducted a survey in conjunction with Supply Chain Management Review (SCMR) to address that question and to gain a better understanding of how manufacturing metrics are characterized, developed, and used to link manufacturing and supply chain performance.

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